Recent reviews by Knight

No Man's Sky is the game my brother and I dreamt about making when we played old space games in the 90s. It has enough depth to feel new despite having spent a lot of hours in it. I can spend my time farming, building, exploring, or chasing plot, and all of those activities are pretty rewarding.

This game is really a masterpiece. The gameplay is smooth, fun, and challenging. The map feels huge and diverse. Music is amazing. Story is gripping. I recommend this to anyone and everyone.

This game has a ton of potential but I can't recommend it as I don't think most people would enjoy it. It's a roguelite, so death is to be expected, but they haven't done the delicate balancing required to make the gameplay rewarding.

My primary gripe - and it's gamebreaking for me - is that the game punishes aggressive play over being slow and strategic, but in most playthroughs you will die to something you couldn't have predicted or controlled. Bullets firing instantly from off-screen. NPCs in an off-screen part of the map triggering mini-bosses that one-shot you. Single pixels of deadly material buried in otherwise harmless goop. Terrain that becomes spontaneously sticky and traps you from moving.

The end result is that you go fast and die fast, or go slow and die fast. The latter just means you lost hours of progress instead of minutes.

Each playthrough is heavily RNG-based, like you'd expect of a roguelite, and the mechanics are so complex that there's really no limit to what you can pull off with the weapons you find. That SHOULD be enless fun - and it has been - but for every great find, you will probably die learning what it does, and it may be many more playthroughs before you get anything like it again.

I'll caveat all of this with two things that don't work for me, but might for some:

1. There's a very active mod community that fixes some of these flaws. If you're into modding a game to make it work, these might not bother you.

2. The game punishes exploration - but if you don't mind spoilers you can get around that be researching what works from other players.

If you don't mind leaning on mods and spoilers, these issues might not bother you as much.

I was excited to try this one, and I feel like they got a lot of things right, but the things they got wrong are enough that after multiple attempts I just can't enjoy the game.

For what they've done right -- I love the artwork, the animation, and the music. The environment and lore make me want to learn more about the world. The turn-based combat system is familiar and encourages the kind of tactical gameplay turn-based games are known for.

For what I didn't like ... they've distilled away the immersive aspects of a typical story-based RPG and replaced them with an overhead map and mission pins. Each mission pin drops you right into an encounter. There doesn't seem to be any gameplay outside of actual battle sequences. I don't think they were trying to make that kind of RPG, but I still found it disappointing.

From what I can see, every mission has some time limit factor. You can't take your time and enjoy the experience, you're forced to rush to the goal (the exist, the bad guy, the treasure chest). As a result there's little exploration, just constantly reacting to urgent threats in the battle.

I find that to excel at any given fight you have to fail at it a few times until you simply learn the pattern of what events happen and when. Things are extremely dynamic -- a fight you thought you were winning will go bad quickly due to things you couldn't have predicted. Once in a while that can be fun, but it seems like every encounter operates this way in order to keep you rushing. The game seems to punish you for not knowing what will happen next, as opposed to for not using your abilities tactically.

Drops. When you kill an enemy, there's a chance it will drop extra health or action points. Both can majorly sway the outcome of the battle, but if you don't pick them up the enemy will. Ultimately they're a hassle I would prefer to turn off, as when/where they show up is too random to be tactical, and too impactful to ignore.

Missions are replayable but that seems to encourage optional objectives that you can't hit on the first pass. Maybe when you return with more abilities/equipment, but there's not much fun in replaying missions as they're the same encounter with the same dialogue every time.

All in all I think this is the foundation of a great franchise, and I hope they make a second one that allows players to explore the world more, and focuses on making fights challenging through rules the player can learn and master, instead of relying so much on surprises.

Game is good.

I've played this for over 100 hours and still haven't made it through 50% of the content, but the progress has been a blast.

Factorio probably isn't for everyone, but if you enjoy engineering and logistic problem solving, you will love it. You will spend most of your time laying down and evolving your automation. You will probably go reaching for a pad of paper at some point when your designs start growing more complex.

NPC enemies play a role but they're mostly there to force you to scale up defenses along with everything else. This isn't a monster-fighting kind of game (unless you let your defenses rot, in which case you will eventually succumb to the onslaught).

The only times this game every frustrates me is when I build myself into a corner, but they provide a lot of handy tools to help you plan new factories without having to commit any real resources. These tools can also be used to share plans with other players.

This is the kind of game where you can aim for optimal-efficiency factories, or more aesthetic and spacious layouts. There are many right ways to play.

Not a puzzle like typical point-and-clicks. You click on each item to unveil story, then start back at the beginning. Mediocre voice acting and store tylling. Nice envirionment (textures, audio, etc). For a free game, it's worth playing for the 20 minutes it takes to beat it.